Selligy Blog

Will your sales kickoff last longer than your New Year’s Resolutions?

Wed, 05 Feb 2014 16:45:24 -0800

Congrats on the sales kickoff! Now, how do you keep that new initiative from fading out …

You’ve got the sales team fired up. They know how you killed it — and why — last year. They know the plan for this year.

But you’ve been around the block, you know that it’s all just talk unless there’s consistent focus, feedback, and execution.

So, the leadership team made clear the strategic metrics that define success — how everyone is going to track progress in CRM. It could be:

marking which deals include the new strategic product
the key data for your new sales process
marking that you’ve asked the top three questions you should ask in the first meeting
feedback to marketing on lead quality

You know you get what you measure – tracking this data drives follow-through and execution. By simply tracking a couple of fields in Salesforce, your salespeople will know where to focus, your managers will know how to coach, and your vice presidents will know how the strategy is working.

But it usually doesn’t work. Like a New Year’s resolution, things start to get a little sloppy by Valentine’s Day … and are a distant memory by Easter.

Why? Because usually, salespeople stop entering the data. So the inspiring words become just words, the strategy is executed by cajoling and meetings, not process.

In fact, our studies show that 75 percent of opportunity records don’t have any of the custom fields filled out.

Here’s how mobile CRM can help

That’s why Selligy focuses on a simple goal: Salespeople should be able to capture critical sales updates while walking out of the customer meeting – with just a few finger swipes, on their iPhones.

By using a mobile app that’s integrated with your calendar and Salesforce, you can slash the effort required to post deal updates by 90 percent – and capture more data at the same time.

Our users have seen five times the number of activities logged – and 150 percent more deal updates per week.

By putting your strategic metrics in your salesperson’s pocket, you can keep focus on making that strategy work.

And not just for New Year’s.

Chris van Löben Sels
director, business development & marketing

Drop us a line for a demo and to discuss a pilot project to better connect your team!

Top Sales Apps: Four critical app categories

Wed, 29 Jan 2014 16:28:00 -0800

Not to knock the food selfie – but salespeople are the most impactful mobile professionals, so maybe great sales tools are the highest value use of the smartphone.

Looking at what sales teams actually do — find customers, connect with them, meet and persuade them — and who they connect with, we can see the four categories of sales applications that make the greatest impact.

The four critical sales app categories are:

Connect with customer data (Selligy, CardMunch, Salesforce1)
General customer intelligence (LinkedIn, InsideView)
Connect with corporate systems (Box, Expensify)
Travel (HotelTonight, TripIt)

Connecting with customer data

Selligy – Our goal is to slash the time it takes for salespeople to get value from – and put data back into salesforce. Turn updating deal data from a 15 min. required chore into 2 minutes of finger swipes that actually capture what the salesperson cares about. And yes, this is a shameless plug. (See a demo,)
LinkedIn CardMunch – better than typing it in on the seat tray in front of you.
Salesforce1 – Sure, our goal is to get everything the field salesperson needs into Selligy. But there’s always more, and it’s probably in Salesforce1.

General customer intelligence

LinkedIn – it’s the gold standard, particularly for the folks who you know the folks they know.
InsideView – and what about the folks you don’t know? InsideView preps you with the news about the company, and good info about the folks you’re about to meet.

Connect with corporate systems

Box – “I’ll send you the follow-up information you asked for” goes from “something I might remember in the hotel at the end of the day” to “something I can get done in the back of a cab.
Expensify – Will travel, will have expenses.

Travel

HotelTonight – lots of travel – especially with the recent storms – means lots of surprise travel arrangements. When you’re stuck, it’s always a nice consolation to stay in a great place, at a price that no one can argue with was a deal.
TripIt – Keep everyone posted with your travel plans – including yourself!

Having lots of tools isn’t always as good as having the right tools.

It’s all about sales productivity

It’s easy to lose time when you’re out on the road. All of these tools aim to save the salesperson non-selling time, make them smarter for when they are selling, or both. It’s all about sales productivity.

Chris van Löben Sels
director, business development & marketing

Drop us a line for a demo and to discuss a pilot project to better connect your team!

Get Past Tesla vs. Edison, Just Don’t Forget Kettering (or, why sometimes it's the invisible inventions that count)

Thu, 23 Jan 2014 10:00:00 -0800

Set aside the Tesla vs. Edison debate and don’t forget Kettering, whose greatest achievement was making his invention invisible. Indeed, his ability to hack electric motors revolutionized the automobile.

Okay, so he’s not reading in a room
full of artificial lightning, but trust me,
Kettering is still very cool.

It’s no surprise that the likes of Nicola Tesla and Thomas Edison inspire a league of tech entrepreneurs. These breakthrough inventors propelled a whole new shape of the world. At the end of the 19th and the start of the 20th century, they sparked the creation of new infrastructure, new ways of working, new industries.

But there are other, lesser known, but inspiring figures from the second half of the 20th Century.

One that I spend a lot of time thinking about is Charles Kettering.

Who? Why?

Kettering – now probably best known as the second name in the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center – invented the electric starter for the automobile (and led the development of the two-stroke diesel engine, the first aerial missile, and the first colored paint for mass produced cars, to name a few more.)

Consider that before Kettering:

Cars had to be started with that huge crank.
Cars had multiple starting controls, like “choke” and “coil,” that you had to adjust to get the car to start.
And these controls were not only complex, but important – if you forgot to set the Coil on Retard before starting, the crank could kick, whip around and seriously injure, even kill, the person trying to start the car.
Women didn’t drive cars by themselves very much, since they were thought as not being strong enough to start one.
The industry’s conventional engineering wisdom was unanimous: there was no way you could use an electric motor to start the car because any electric motor powerful enough to turn the engine over would be too heavy to put in the car.

But Kettering came from outside the industry – from, of all places, National Cash Register, where he had learned quite a bit about small electric motors. He saw that a small motor, supplied with more current and voltage than it could handle in continuous operation, could produce enough force to turn over the motor in a few seconds.

(In today’s terms, we would call overclocking an electric motor one heck of a hack.)

By turning the conventional wisdom on its head, Kettering made cars safer, simpler to use, and doubling the number of potential drivers.

Spark and fuel settings for the Model T.
Once you’ve memorized these settings,
there are five more to remember …

And here’s the seeming paradox – and where the parallel to today’s technology comes in:

Kettering made cars much more complex (on the inside) and much simpler to use (on the outside). And that’s where today’s enterprise applications need to go.

As Kettering’s ‘self-starter’ cars became more advanced, more and more of that complexity became hidden behind a simpler and simpler interface. Today’s cars, with electronic fuel injection adjust the engine’s settings based on air pressure, oxygen level, ambient temperature, and more.

But now we just have an On/Off switch.

Somewhat simpler.

And that’s where we are going with today’s technology – using innovation to hide complexity from the user. Nothing makes this more critical than mobile.

It used to be great that business applications actually let you feel where the underlying data tables were. By navigating up and down the levels of data, the user learned what was really going on. And it made it much easier to do things like build your own reports and queries.

But this is kind of like saying that it was a lot cooler to have to manually adjust the engine timing so the car doesn’t stall up hills. Sure, it makes you more attuned to the car, but that’s not really why you’re driving.

Now is the time to add complexity inside applications, to make the outside simpler. Yes, this requires turning some industry conventional wisdom on its head. And yes, hiding complexity requires a lot of intelligence and sensors behind the scenes. You need to build algorithms that do what everyone used to say “you can’t do that.”

Consider one problem we work on here at Selligy: a salesperson on the road just finished a meeting. Now she wants to rate how the meeting went in her CRM system, add a couple of people on the meeting invite to the system, record who came to the meeting, mark who the buyer is, update the revenue forecast for the deal, and maybe fill in a couple of custom fields about the attendees and on the opportunity.

This task requires the salesperson to touch as many as 20 records, do as many as ten searches/lookups, post a half dozen separate saves, do a few cut-and-pastes. It’s a fairly big job that gets left to the end of the day – and then just the minimum gets done, if it gets done at all.

While this level of complexity been around in CRM for years, the advent of mobile means something has to change. Hide the complexity and you get more data into CRM, while salespeople spend less time entering it – you can hear the conventional wisdom say ‘you can’t do that!’ (With Selligy, we now have all this down to just a handful of taps and finger swipes. Our goal is to let the salesperson do it on their iPhone, while walking to the next meeting.)

We have to do this. The complexity belongs where Kettering would put it — under the hood, not on the dashboard.

Chris van Löben Sels

director, business development & marketing

Drop us a line and see the demo! Then let’s do a pilot project to save your team some complexity!

You Can't Coach What You Cant See: Mobile CRM and Sales Productivity

Tue, 21 Jan 2014 12:04:55 -0800

Is that safety out of position? Then again, are the safeties on the field?

What are sports coaches doing most of the time? Watching their players play. Without watching carefully, how could the coach spot the pattern, assess the skill, give the right feedback at the right time, or call the right play?

How can you coach what you can’t see?

If you want to know the answer, talk to any sales coach.

Football coaches watch every play, but no sales manager can go to every meeting of every team member.

Rather than watch every play, sales coaches have to sit down and ask their team what’s going on. Hence the long tradition of the “status meeting” where most of the time is spent simply exchanging basic information on the state of play in each deal.

You would think that CRM systems would be a big help here. With every deal in CRM, the sales manager should have up-to-the-minute information about how everything is going, able to hop in with the right suggestion at the right time.

But most CRM systems simply serve as an agenda for the status meeting. Every deal is there, so the manager and the rep can go down the list of deals. But most field sales people don’t add even the most basic information – which is a shame, since it’s a pain for the sales person to have to recite a play-by-play to their manager.

Mobile CRM can help.

Slash the amount of time it takes to get data back into CRM, and, sure enough, sales people will put more data back into CRM – especially if the mobile app is tailored to what the rep and manager actually care about, real coaching and deal strategy questions.

In fact, one of Selligy’s customers saw a five-fold increase in the number of meetings logged in Salesforce.com after rolling out Selligy. Compare that to our study showing that, an the average company, 75 percent of opportunity records have no detailed information at all, beyond the standard forecast fields.

Here’s an example of how mobile can help: One Selligy customer faced a classic challenge in a growing market: precious sales capacity wasted on window shoppers, where the actual buyer wasn’t engaged.

Selligy helped this customer coach their reps on where to spend their time. The sales leadership team added a simple field to each contact: Is this person the buyer? Selligy made it easy to answer the question after each sales meeting – automatically adding the meeting and all of the attendees to Salesforce with a simple finger swipe.

In fact, mobile CRM can become part of sales coaching – managers can configure meeting reports to ask their good reps the questions that the great reps are keeping track of. This transforms CRM from a babysitter and bookkeeper into a helpful reminder and assistant coach.

All in all, it’s no surprise. Mobile CRM is about keeping field salespeople better connected.

And how can you coach without connecting?

Chris van Löben Sels

director, business development & marketing

Drop us a line for a demo and to discuss a pilot project to better connect your team!

Houston. Selligy. Roll program!

Wed, 13 Nov 2013 06:21:55 -0800

We have cleared the tower …

When a NASA rocket clears the tower, the radio call is “Houston, Roll Program.” At that point control is handed over from Launch Control to Mission Control. The work of getting off the ground is done.

The focus on getting launched is replaced with achieving the mission: run through the thousands of steps to get from 100 mph to 20,000 mph as quickly and safely as possible.

This is what just happened to Selligy.

Getting to space takes fuel (and a guidance system)

We are ecstatic to announce that we have closed our Series A financing, a $2.8 million round. Even more exciting than the fuel is the guidance system — a great team to help us navigate the path ahead.

The round was led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) and managing partner Josh Stein has been appointed to the Selligy Board of Directors. Josh has deep experience in enterprise and SaaS business models - being first investor in Box and SugarCRM. His other enterprise investments include Yammer and Twilio. More importantly, Josh has already been a great guidance system for me and the team.

Also in the round are the Alchemist Accelerator and salesforce.com. Ravi Belani, the force behind the Alchemist, has been a guide for almost a year now. And, of course, the salesforce.com team needs no introduction. It’s fantastic to have the backing of the platform our customers rely on to run their business.

While getting the fuel is critical, what’s more important is the progress we’re making on the actual mission.

The Mission:
Build great mobile tools for sales.

Our vision for Selligy is simple: to make both salespeople and sales teams more effective. How? By building mobile tools that help salespeople with their selling activities, and as a result, giving their companies rich data on how those activities push deals forward.”

CRM is a $18 billion industry, but there’s still so much more to do to connect people and teams with the data they need. Our analysis of CRM data found that salespeople just fill out the most basic fields 75 percent of the time.

As a result, sales teams don’t have data beyond the most basic forecast. They don’t have any data on key questions like: Who are the competitors? What products were pitched, but not pursued? Did the actual buyer attend the first meetings?

And it’s not surprising that mobile salespeople aren’t getting this data into any system — right now no app is focused on helping them sell. As a result, salespeople are wasting tons of time digging data out of email, spreadsheets, and multiple apps.

Until there’s an app that helps salespeople manage their actual day-to-day activities, there won’t be much data in enterprise systems about how those activites help push deals forward.

And so we give you Selligy Enterprise.

Firing on all engines …

Introducing Selligy Enterprise:
Starting a pilot at a company near you

Selligy is a mobile service that helps salespeople manage their flow of customer meetings, connecting them to critical data and to their enterprise systems.

Selligy Enterprise, released today, uses a salesperson’s mobile context – where they are, who they are meeting, what is available to the on-phone calendar and contacts – to intuit the precise data they need from Salesforce, social media profiles, and other systems.

By intelligently matching context to data, Selligy Enterprise reduces time spent navigating applications for key information, and makes it seamless to provide updates to critical systems. For example, Selligy Enterprise automatically detects when a meeting concludes and sends a notification reminding the salesperson to record the meeting results. When the notification is tapped, Selligy Enterprise presents a customized mobile meeting report, cutting out the manual steps of updating many different records to enable easy and near real-time capturing of deal status.

Selligy Enterprise also allows our customers to easily create custom meeting reports, asking key questions after each meeting — giving the salesperson better notes than they usually take today, and taking less time doing it.

And the impact on sales teams is profound, allowing sales leaders to build dashboards that better gauge deal qualification, competitive tactics, forecast accuracy, and even use the questions to reinforce the selling from the best reps across the team.

With Selligy, salespeople can use their iPhones to:
• Update opportunities and forecasts
• Answer customizable deal questions
• Add meeting attendees to Salesforce
• Set follow-up activities
• See Salesforce and social media contact data
• Dial conference calls with a single tap
• See when to leave for their next meeting

Selligy’s launch involved fewer ties.

We couldn’t be more excited about all of this progress. But the most exciting progress is seeing Selligy Enterprise in customer hands, making salespeople and teams happier. It’s going to be a great rocket ride. Join us!

Nilay Patel, Co-founder and CEO

Drop us a line for a demo and to discuss a pilot project for your team! Or come visit us at Dreamforce 2013 next week.

The 3 Biggest CRM Stories of the Last Week

Mon, 26 Aug 2013 09:30:00 -0700

And now, from the CRM news desk …

SugarCRM’s $40 million:
A new leader on the horizon?

Goldman Sachs invested $40 million in SugarCRM, a company on the edge of breaking out of Gartner’s ‘Visonary’ quadrant in SFA. The financing should enable the team to lift their ‘ability to execute’ the short distance required to get SugarCRM into the ‘Leader’ box. Meanwhile, Salesforce’s focus remains on building out its cloud platform and marketing suite (see our predictions about this, which, ahem, we can’t help pointing out, came true). SugarCRM leaping up to the next level would introduce new competition in the core CRM market, something that could significantly re-shape the category. (Coverage from The Register, VentureBeat, ZDNet.)

Evolution CRM Conference 2013:
Mobile, Social, Customer Experience

The Evolution CRM conference brought a ton of attention to Social, Customer Experience Management, and Mobile CRM. There’s a great collection of CRM wisdom quotes from Maria Minsker here. And a social CRM wrap-up here.

Bye bye, Ballmer, bye bye.

Few stories have as broad a potential impact. Ballmer’s successor will have a huge foundation, from consumer to enterprise, platform to apps, internet to entertainment. But, ever since the death of the Longhorn Windows release, the question has been, what is the next thing to build on that foundation?

Most interesting is the possibility that Satya Nadella, executive vice president of Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise group, could be a successor. He was previously president of the Server and Tools group, and is now head of the group for both the CloudOS and the Dynamics product line. Nadella at the top would bring a technologist with direct experience in enterprise applications — not just platforms — to the CEO post. Many of Microsoft’s enterprise offerings seem to have much unrealized potential — will Ballmer’s successor find a way to unleash them?

Chris van Löben Sels

We’re not gunning for Ballmer’s job, we’re just trying to unleash the power of mobile CRM to make sales teams more productive — and CRM more valuable — by making it possible to update Salesforce with just a few finger swipes. If you’re a visionary sales leader, drop us a line for a demo and to discuss a pilot!

The CRM Graveyard: Mobile CRM, Sales Operations, and Saving Dead Custom Fields

Wed, 21 Aug 2013 17:03:00 -0700

Hey, is that guy taking our data?

There is no CRM worth its salt that doesn’t promise great customizability. Every business is different. Every year brings new challenges. Who wouldn’t want to adapt their CRM to gather the information that will power those critical insights you need?

Which competitors are the big problem? Which deals have the most strategic product? Did the deal result from our new positioning? Who is the most influential contact in the account? Who wouldn’t want to know these answers?

Well, sadly, CRM experience teaches that this hope isn’t always fulfilled. “The guys in HQ” add a bunch of great custom fields, and wait for the data to roll in, and the insights to flow.

And wait … and wait … and wait.

Ultimately, the fields never get filled in. They slide into the CRM graveyard of dead, empty fields. And when data doesn’t flow, you get a different insight: It’s hard to use CRM to get the data you want.

Why is it hard to get great data?

Because it’s hard to input the data.

It’s amazing to see how buried “that really strategic field” is in most CRM implementations. The Opportunity record often has over 150 fields – sometimes twice that – a number that hasn’t changed much in the last ten years.

Worse yet, it’s even harder to enter the data that salespeople actually need to sell well; tasks like: tracking which of contacts attended the last meeting, keeping notes of who is an ally or an obstacle in an account, or recording the best customer qualifying questions.

Salespeople commonly find it’s ten times faster to use Excel than CRM for this kind of actual selling information.

Common reaction from
the sales field when HQ
tells them to fill out more
CRM fields.

And on top of that, the salesperson must – to keep his or her job – keep their forecast up-to-date. So all of the time a salesperson has for mucking about with CRM is already taken up by this mandatory task. Hence, the salesperson leaves the custom fields empty – because they’re always less important than the forecast (no matter how much ‘the guy in HQ’ insists otherwise).

Back from the dead.

So is it time to give custom fields up for dead? Hardly.

We’ve found that mobile CRM can get the data flowing again. But it’s not as easy as it looks – there are many mobile CRM apps out there that have slid into the graveyard themselves.

Here are the principles that have made a difference for our customers so far – and we’re still learning …

If you want salespeople to help you, help them sell. Selligy focuses first on giving the salesperson useful data – and helping them record data they really care about – when they are out in the field, not back at a desk.

Incremental is not enough, it takes a fundamental change in usability. At Selligy, we aim for 5 to 10x improvement in the time it takes to interact with a system; it’s a high bar, but until you hit it, you won’t see a significant change in user habits.

Context is king. The Selligy app focuses on the salesperson’s daily flow of tasks – preparing for meetings, going to meetings, following up and planning next steps.

But wait there’s more …

Great sales operations folks are one of the key factors to bringing CRM back from the dead.

Great sales leaders know the questions that CRM should be asking salespeople. They’re the questions that good sales managers are asking their teams. They’re the fields that will actually help salespeople prioritize their efforts. Picking these questions – and making them easy to answer using mobile CRM – is key.

And that will help bring CRM – and new sales insights – back to life!

Chris van Löben Sels

If you’re a visionary sales leader, drop us a line for a demo and to discuss a pilot!

The next enterprise software category will not end in “M”

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 18:49:00 -0700

The death of M

Most of the enterprise application markets to date have a three-letter acronym that ends in M – for management.

HCM – human capital management
SCM – supply-chain management
CRM – customer relationship management
EFM (or just FM) – enterprise financial management

There’s a good reason all these apps end in M: Who uses (and buys) these applications?

Managers.

All of these applications solve difficult problems for managers – from getting the revenue forecast right, to getting the taxes right on every paycheck every week, to tracking hundreds of millions of physical items through the manufacturing process. And watching every penny so the quarterly reports are accurate (or else a manager could, literally, go to jail).

But several new technologies are now creating an opportunity for a new category of enterprise applications focused on the problems faced by actual line employees – not managers.

Yesware is a new application that allows salespeople to become more effective at using email, perhaps the most important tool they have. It helps the salesperson manage email templates and measure which emails are the most effective.

Clearslide has taken off by providing salespeople with better tools for giving – and, again, measuring the effectiveness – of their presentations.

Selligy – our product – is a mobile application focused on helping salespeople prepare for, arrive on time at, dial into, and measure the results of their flow of customer meetings.

What makes these applications different from the classic management applications?

The user is the buyer – and gets immediate value. These apps provide value by solving the problems of the individual employee – rather than the management of the entire enterprise. The rise of App Stores — from the iOS App Store to the Chrome Store to Salesforce.com’s AppExchange — allows individual users to be the buyer — and thus makes it possible to write applications primarily focused on end-user value.

Enabling the quantified enterprise life. These apps integrate directly into the end user’s tools. This gives the end user fantastic new levels of data – on par with personal fitness app data. Rather than track how far you’ve run, these apps track how effective your day-to-day tasks are. All of this helps the end user be better at his or her job.

Something for the boss as well. This new activity data will also be a goldmine to managers as well. It will act as a new feedback system about how they, too, can help the line employee do a better job.

Plays well with others. One of the marks of the traditional applications is that they “own the space,” generally replacing their predecessors. Having a single, central system is critical to providing managers with a unified dashboard. But these new tools deliver value directly to the end user, integrating well with (not necessarily replacing) existing systems.

So, these applications concentrate on making enterprise users more effective, rather than making the enterprise as a whole more manageable.

Of course, while they have a terrible reputation for usability, enterprise application companies do care about usability and end users. But, ultimately, when you sell a management application to managers, the management features become mandatory and the usability features become optional.

We’re excited at Selligy to be able to turn this on its head: for Selligy, delighting the end user is mandatory, everything else is optional. If you’re interested in what this looks like, check out our product video.

What will this new category of enterprise application be called? I’ll write more about this in future posts. But here are some possibilities:

- Enterprise Effectiveness Applications
- Personal Enterprise Apps
- Employee Effectiveness Apps
- Personal Enterprise Effectiveness Apps

What I do know is that – whatever the name is – it doesn’t end in M. The managers have their applications now. It’s time for technology to help the rest of the enterprise.

Chris van Löben Sels

Making the customer king

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 22:24:00 -0700

Inc.'s John Brandon has a great interview with Eric Ries with start up advice. Like many other experienced tech folks, he emphasizes getting the product to customers quickly, so you can figure out what is wrong quickly, so you can fix it quickly.

But unlike many other commentaries, Eric puts it this way: "whatever you do make the customer king." Given all the talk in our industry about disruptive technology, visionary prescience, and next-big-thing-ism, it’s great to see someone as buzzword compliant (Eric apparently coined ‘pivot’!) put the customer at the center.

Making the customer king is actually what we think creates the disruptive opportunity for Selligy. Up until now, sales tools were sold to sales managers and sold the (very hard) problems that sales managers have.

But now, with AppStores and smartphones, we can build sell sales software directly to salespeople. So we can build sales software that solves the (also very hard) problems that actual salespeople have. Our goal is to give salespeople software that, for the first time, will make them feel like they’re the king.

Because it’s good to be the king.

Chris van Löben Sels

How can you tell if someone has deep enterprise experience? By how they respect sales.

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 12:10:00 -0700

This post was inspired by Anthony Iannarino’s posts about taking back the word sales.

If you know real enterprise sales guys, you know they’re not Joe Isuzu…

How can you tell if someone has deep enterprise experience? By how they talk about — and respect — enterprise sales.

We love listening Aaron Levie making fun of enterprise sales. His slides are hilarious. Joke enterprise sales guy, joke cheesy expression, joke cheesy hair, charismatic and, well, cheesy at the same time.

We agree – enterprise selling is in the process of being transformed – and that’s a good thing.

And yes, we love to laugh about what salesguys get up to (heck, so do salesguys), we even have a home for our sales humor (Busted Quota). But we respect them and their craft. Because we know how awesome awesome salespeople can be.

The stereotype … versus the guy who built your business

If you’ve been in this business for more than five years, enterprise salespeople have paid your rent or your mortgage, paid for that next car, for your vacations.

Salespeople practice a complex craft – not unlike how designers discern what makes a great product, or engineering managers know how to guide a team.

Great salespeople discern deeply how the world of how people, information, emotion, organizations and decisions interact.

Each has an explicit process and style of working – and to the non-practitioner, great sales (like great design or great engineering leadership) looks like a combination of hard work and uncanny instincts for how to make things happen in the end.

Enough self-righteousness, the jokes are still funny

All that aside, it’s people in enterprise companies who invented enterprise sales jokes in the first place.
Calling salespeople “coin-operated” didn’t exactly start in the enterprise sales department at Instragram.

While we have learned that a salesperson’s credibility is often the asset that gets the deal done, we also suspect “salesperson’s credilibity” is also a pretty good punchline.

Besides, in my experience, more salespeople find sales jokes funny than most designers and engineers find jokes about them.

And, more importantly: Aaron is still right!

Aaron is right. Enterprise software does suck in many ways. (Yes, I’m including software I’ve helped build at PeopleSoft, Oracle, and Adobe). It solves gnarly problems to be sure, but often in pretty gnarly ways.

And so does the business model. And, of course, so do some salespeople.

We agree with Aaron that app stores allow us to sell directly to the user. By selling to the user, we get to (and have to) focus on the user’s problems — which are different problems than the user’s boss has. Usability, adoptability, and hour-to-hour value become the non-negotiable goal, not the nice-to-have. As Aaron says, this changes everything.

So, we expect our business will involve more consumer selling and inside sales and less traditional enterprise sales.

But not because enterprise salespeople suck.

We have too much enterprise experience to think that.

Chris van Löben Sels

Why the heck did Salesforce borrow $1 billion dollars?

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 14:27:00 -0700

Salesforce.com just announced a proposed private placement of $1 billion in senior convertible debt, with an option for an additional $150 million and a hedging transaction to offset dilution.

Why?

Well, I don’t know. And they won’t say. Generally, people borrow cash so they can buy something with it. And if you’re going to buy $1 billion of it, you don’t pre-announce you plans and drive up the price.

But here’s my take.

Just under two weeks ago, Marc Benioff led a session in New York announcing Salesforce’s direction as the Customer Company. The customer revolution, he said, will connect companies to their customers in radically new ways – he had nothing short of nine factors driving this revolution: Social, Touch, Local, Big Data, Identity, Community, Ecosystem, Cloud, and Trust. This revolution, he said, would lead to much more connected customers, partners, employees and products.

While we’ve seen ‘customers, partners, and employees’ in similar presentations since the late 1990s, adding products is new. Benioff talked about the ‘Internet of Things,’ where your camera, your fridge, your car all provide data that connect you back to the vendor.

He envisioned (in a positive light) a Minority Report like experience of walking into a Canon store and having the salesperson walk up and ask, “How’s that DSLR you bought in January working out for you?”

The presentation laid out a big vision. To build that vision, Salesforce is going to need more product. More product means more acquisitions. And apparently that means about a billion more in cash.

Like most good long-range vision statements, Benioff’s presentation packed a mix of new innovation and competitive positioning. On the innovation side, it’s brilliant to parley Salesforce’s cloud-based CRM data into the central platform for all mobile apps, social communities, and interconnected products. It essentially says, ‘when you get serious about any of these initiatives, come talk to us first.’

This leverages a natural strength of the platform into a powerful vendor lock-in. What customer wants to build a platform for dealing with very high scale product analytics from scratch, then integrate it into their Salesforce system, if they can just start with the Salesforce platform?

It’s also great positioning against a very serious Oracle threat. Oracle has put together an extremely powerful platform of customer-centric SaaS products. RightNow for customer service (a weak spot for Salesforce), Eloqua for marketing automation (another weak spot for Salesforce), Vitrue for social (probably the better buy at a much better price than Salesforce’s BuddyMedia buy), and ATG for eCommerce (a hole in the Salesforce platform).

Now it’s time for a bit of disclosure. I worked in product strategy at Adobe, where we rolled out a fairly similar vision to the Customer Experience vision of Oracle (they call it CX, launched in NYC last June, we called it Customer Experience Management). And the ‘Customer Company’ vision is an interesting twist on the same trend. Oh, and I also worked at Oracle after the PeopleSoft acquisition (well before Larry’s SaaS buying spree, though). And a ton of my colleagues at PeopleSoft are now at Salesforce (but I haven’t talked to any of them about this article). So I may be biased toward seeing the predictions we made about Customer Experience Management come true. </disclosure>

Unlike Salesforce, however, Oracle doesn’t have a central platform on which to build new apps. In fact, even getting all of the above solutions to use a single customer database to do their current jobs is a real stretch. So the Customer Company vision puts the focus on Salesforce’s strength and Oracle’s weakness.

So, what are they going to do with the $1 billion? Here are some ideas:

Expand the platform with big data, mobile app, and Internet-of-Things technologies. There are too many possibilities here to catalog, since these would probably be technology acquisitions, ahead of customer demand, rather than expanding the customer base. But if you wanted to do a handful of these, plus a medium-sized buy or two, you might want a billion to do it.

Expand the digital marketing offering and attack Oracle-Eloqua. If Salesforce’s mission is to connect companies with customers, they need a leading solution in the communication applications of email and multi-channel marketing. Marketo was the most obvious candidate, but they are heading to an IPO. Responsys (NASDAQ:MKTG) is another; it may be more affordable. ExactTarget is another possibility. And there’s a plethora of smaller multi-channel campaign management possibilities, from Neolane, to Silverpop, to many others.

Attack Oracle-RightNow with a next-gen customer service offering. Much of the connected product applications will connect to the customer support apps, not the sales apps. Salesforce might think that they can’t leave RightNow uncontested. ZenDesk is a possibility. So is RingCentral.

Attack Oracle-RightNow with a social communities offering. One possibility that overlaps both customer service and connected-to-customer is social support communities. While Jive (NASDAQ:JIVE) does this, they also do a lot of other things and weren’t built on SaaS first. Lithium is the likely target here. (yet more disclosures, Rob Tarkoff, Lithium’s CEO, is a former boss and mentor; and we didn’t talk about this article).

What’s not on this list? I don’t think that Salesforce needs to buttress its core Sales Cloud offering. There’s a ton of innovation in new tools for helping salespeople sell. And, thanks to the growing number of app stores (iOS, Android, Chrome, etc.), these startups can now sell direct to the salesperson.

Why doesn’t Salesforce need to move in this area? Because all of these start-ups have, or will, integrate with Salesforce (which is easy) and not Oracle (which is very hard, given the number of products) or SAP (which requires on-site software installed by IT in most cases).

So that leaves companies like Yesware, Clearslide, Crushpath, and Selligy to build great tools for salespeople – putting Salesforce even more into the lead as the customer platform. Linda Crawford’s SalesCloud presentation had a ton of content about the Customer-Connected Sales team, but left plenty of room for the Salesforce ecosystem.

(Final disclosure! My current job is at Selligy, where we’re doing just that: building a great application on top of Salesforce to help salespeople sell.)

Given Oracle’s massive buying campaign, Salesforce needs to outflank its new rival, not re-trench into its core. These are my guesses as the probable moves.

Then again, what couldn’t you do with a billion?

Chris van Löben Sels

Indispensable Mobile Sales Apps – The Road Warrior List

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 15:57:45 -0800

At Selligy, we’re road warriors building an app for road warriors … so we spend a lot of time looking at what works to help salespeople sell, from calculating when to leave based on traffic conditions in a strange city to taking better notes to finding that hotel room you didn’t think you needed …

Let us know what you think should be added! Or droppped!

Selligy	(Yes, it’s a shameless plug — but you knew it was coming, so let’s just do it right now!) Selligy helps salespeople with an iPhone and Salesforce.com get to their meetings on time and prepared. It uses real-time traffic to tell you when to leave to your next meeting — and will even text your customers if you’re late. It intelligently finds missing meeting location data and you’ll see social media photos of contacts in Salesforce. Click here to get Selligy now!


Expensify	The tagline says it all — expense reports that don’t suck. Any road warrior faces the headache of turning expenses into reimbursements … Expensify helps! They’re our heroes because they are trying to make enterprise apps better by introducing the discipline of selling directly to the user — just as we’re doing for salespeople.


Yesware	Selligy and Expensify help with meetings and calls, Yesware helps with email — the third critical tool in any salesperson’s quiver. Yesware is a gmail plugin that helps you track email templates and see whether your customers are opening your emails. A critical tool!


Evernote	At the end of the ten-meeting road trip, what happened in meeting number six? Evernote tries to help make it easier to both make and read your notes from the road.


Cardmunch	It may be 2:00 am in your home time zone, but Cardmunch is easy enough that you can still take snapshots of the cards you got during the day … and have them as contacts in the morning. The mix of automated technology and human checking is, all in all, quite decent.


HotelTonight	Snow storm? Sudden customer emergency? Where am I going to stay? For those of us without a 24-hour travel agent, Hotel Tonight helps you find that last-minute bargain. The unexpected stay in a five-star hotel (while coming in under budget) is much better than the unexpected stay in a (literal) roach motel.


Starbucks!	Because coffee is for closers. And closers on the road need to find the nearest Starbucks, a.k.a. the mobile office.

What are your favorite tools? What tool doesn’t exist that you think should? Let us know!

Chris van Löben Sels, Marketing

Three things any good salesperson (or Homer Simpson) could have told the Super Bowl ad makers

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 13:59:00 -0800

Of course, there’s a ton of Monday morning quarterbacking about the Super Bowl – not the football game, but the ads. Some say the ads are an incredible waste. And some experts have some compelling proof of their value.

While millions of dollars go into the ads, some of them could have used the wisdom of any talented salesperson – or even Homer Simpson.

Here are some lessons that any salesperson could offer our Super Bowl marketers, with a little help from Homer.

1. Getting your customers’ attention is not always enough

While any salesperson can tell you this, perhaps Homer Simpson’s example is best. He’s trying to figure out how to get people to go bowling. So, to get everyone’s attention, he simply steps out in to the parking lot, fires a shotgun in the air and then shouts “Bowling here!”

One of the best examples of this this year was the Toyata RAV4 Genie ad. It was super interesting – lots of great special effects, physical humor, wordplay, and surprises. But the ad seemed to offer nothing about why one would want to buy a, um … what car was that about again?

Marketers have a fancy name for this: “borrowed interest.” When you borrow interest from an unrelated subject, it doesn’t always translate into better sales.

Interestingly, salespeople don’t have an equivalent term for “borrowed interest” – that’s because salespeople just know not to do this. If they had a name for it, they’d probably just call it “wasting someone’s time.”

2. If you go for the emotions, you have to be authentic

On the other end of the spectrum are the ads that take a products’ actual identity and build a connection to that. The Dodge Ram “God Made a Farmer” ad silenced the TV room in millions of homes. And the ad worked because, well, farmers really do all those incredible things and they really do rely on their trucks every day.

3. You can be exciting – even about the least exciting feature

So, you might think that you have a choice between really general emotional appeals and boring ads about features.

But great salespeople can help their customers make an emotional connection to even the most boring feature.

Look at the Mercedes ad. It had all the Super Bowl fluff – special effects, fantasy sequence, supernatural overtones, iconic pop song, perfectly cast celebrity cameos. But in the end, the ad was completely focused on bringing attention to the most pedestrian of all product points – price.

Marketing is selling – and great salespeople can still teach marketers a thing or two about how to do that. That’s why at Selligy, we’re building tools to help salespeople do what they do so well. Sign up for our beta to learn more!

Chris van Löben Sels, Marketing

We're accelerating!

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 10:05:00 -0800

Selligy just graduated from the inaugural class of the Alchemist Accelerator, founded by Ravi Belani of Stanford and formerly of DFJ.

Usman, our fearless CTO, brought literal cheers from the crowd as they saw Selligy in action at the first Alchemist Demo Day. Auto-suggested texts, conference call dialing, and some other features we’re keeping under our hats for now – the crowd loved them all. Not bad for a guy who stepped in only after the flu put our fearless (but apparently still mortal) CEO Nilay flat on his back on the big day.

The Demo Day was attended by a host of top venture capital firms – and press. Check out the coverage:

Wall St. Journal: Alchemist Accelerator Graduates its First Class

GigaOm: Alchemist Accelerator shows off as enterprise investment picks up

VentureBeat: Silicon Valley rallies behind Alchemist, an incubator for B2B startups

Our Alchemist classmates are an incredible group, all focused on changing the way enterprises work. We can’t wait to see all that this great group will accomplish. It’s been a great experience. We’re grateful to Ravi and the whole team.

Chris van Löben Sels, Marketing

Why Selligy doesn’t have job descriptions

Thu, 15 Nov 2012 17:44:21 -0800

For the last year, Selligy has been a team of 3. We all have different titles on our business cards, but the lines between our respective roles are blurred. The traditional roles for CEOs, CTOs, and Creative Directors are generally well defined, but we all help shape the vision of what Selligy will be, we all contribute substantial code to our product, we all help define the look and feel of the app and the Selligy brand. Everyone’s job is to do whatever is necessary to ensure Selligy is successful, and our customers are happy.

As Creative Director, my first order of business when I joined last year was to establish the Selligy identity. That actually started with the look and feel of the app, which then extended into our logo, website, and all the other pieces of our brand that customers interact with.

Those are all standard tasks for the job, but it didn’t end there. Other key projects from this last year include:

Writing, storyboarding, filming, and producing the 2-minute video on our homepage.
Learning Django and building the front end of our operations applications. This also includes learning regular expressions and writing a lot of the code that parses out conference call information from meeting notes.
Learning Objective C and taking ownership of all the interactivity and UI code in the iPhone app. I’ve also been writing code for some of the backend functionality, like facial detection algorithms that ensure the photos you see of contacts in our app are centered on faces.

“It’s not my job” is something you’ll never hear in our office. What you will here is “I don’t know how to do that, but I’ll find out.” I personally have had to say that a lot in the last year!

I’m sure Nilay and Usman have similar lists of things they’ve done in the last year that they didn’t expect, or which they had to teach themselves. Geocoding, pitching, fund-raising, managing the press, building systems and infrastructure, and even grocery shopping - we share in all of these things.

We’ve recently been looking to add additional members to the Selligy team, and one of the biggest things we look for is a willingness to dive into whatever needs to be done. There is no task too challenging, and no task to menial for any of us. To build a successful business and an amazing product, it all has to be done, and done well. When we see a need, we expect someone to jump on it, own it, and stay up late building it if necessary.

This is one of the great things about working at a startup - there is no routine, there is no normal. If you’re the sort of person who likes a challenge, there’s a new one every day, so it never gets boring.

Brian Scates, Creative Director

PS - we’re hiring, so if any of this sounds appealing to you, reach out to us.

Six cringeworthy things at Dreamforce (that I’m glad no one made me do)

Tue, 25 Sep 2012 11:08:00 -0700

Here at Selligy, we love salespeople. Helping them is all we do.

We’re lucky, because salespeople are pretty smart, so they’re not going to go for something just because you’re wearing a bunny suit. Not surprisingly, then, dressing as an animal wasn’t on our list of ideas for Dreamforce.

But apparently, not everyone thinks their customers are immune to gimmicks like dressing as a donkey … which brings us to …

1. Dressing as a donkey.

It’s hard not to feel like a @$%#, when you’re actually dressed like a @$%#!

2. Wearing fake appendages.

Like butterfly wings. “Social butterfly” as a social software metaphor is as awful as Star Trek Enterprise puns were for enterprise software. Can’t wait ‘til that’s over. (I’m guessing he’d agree.)

3. Wearing the big logo suit.

At least the logo is smiling (not sure that the person inside is though, rough gig!).

4. Going over the top, as a fake superhero.

Like Missing Data Man, or Super Lead Finder, or Systems Integrator Hero. At least we can tell she’s actually smiling!

5. Not going over the top enough, as James Bond characters.

Perhaps it’s worse when you need James Bond music to explain that, no, you’re in a costume, not just slightly better dressed than other attendees. (They had just wrapped up when I took the pic, James Bond wasn’t wearing a backpack when he was on duty.) Gotta give them credit for being shaken-not-stirred with the whole gag …

6. Wearing a kimono.

Still not sure what this was about. Poor guys …

So despite that obvious attraction of trying to get our CEO to wear a kimono/logo/superhero outfit, we’re lucky, because we didn’t have to do any of that.

First, our strategy is get smart salespeople to try our app – because smart salespeople are the salespeople that everyone else will follow. And, generally, they don’t go in for butterfly wings.

And, second, we’re lucky because all we had to do was show our product. Once we did, salespeople loved it. (Want to know why? Take a look at the video here.)

No better gimmick than that!

Chris van Löben Sels, Marketing

Founder Showcase grand prize goes to Selligy

Sun, 29 Jul 2012 21:29:00 -0700

From the 60 startups that applied to the Founder Showcase startup competition, Selligy successfully made it through the finals and went on to take home the grand prize!

The VC judges gave us a fantastic score, but more important to us was the feedback from the salespeople in the audience. They hunted us down and said things like:

"Directly dialing me into my conference calls!! Without memorizing the all the numbers! Awesome!"
"Filling in the text message to tell my customer I’m running late, so I don’t have to do it while I’m driving? Or pull over? That’s incredible."
"I want it now! Give it to me now!"

This is music to our ears. It’s better than winning.

Our message is simple: In order to successfully execute customer meetings, a salesperson needs access to information from a lot of different systems. It is hard or impossible to access this information from a mobile phone. Selligy solves this for salespeople.

After delivering the demo we had rehearsed for weeks, we were blown away by the judges’ scores - a FIVE, the only pitch to get a 5 (out of 5) all night!! from Rob Coneybeer, Shasta Ventures.

I believe we won for two reasons:

The market opportunity is massive! Aaron Levie, co-founder of Box kicked off the competition by stating employees are disconnected from their enterprise while in the field. In sales - this is most acute. Not having the right information before a sales call can literally mean lost revenue.

Selligy has assembled the right team to pull this off. I’ve traveled the world having customer meetings. Usman codes so fast he wears out keyboards. And Brian’s design talent and attention to detail can be seen everywhere.

But enough celebrating! We’re already back to work preparing for our next beta release. If you’re in sales, sign up now! We’re giving away a Jambox speakerphone to one lucky person who registers before the end of July.

Nilay, Co-founder and CEO

Selligy has been invited to compete at the Founder Showcase demo...

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 09:34:00 -0700

Selligy has been invited to compete at the Founder Showcase demo competition in Mountain View, California tomorrow afternoon! Eight startups will mount the stage for three minute pitches. We are proud of being selected amongst the 50+ that applied, but let’s be honest - we are shooting to win!

More tomorrow… stay tuned.

Apple : Help the best app developers not get "acquihired"!

Fri, 20 Jul 2012 14:46:00 -0700

This morning, I learned that Sparrow, my favorite email application on both iOS and Mac OS was acquired by Google and subsequently shutting down. The first thing I do each morning and the last thing I do each evening is check Sparrow. Sparrow made email fun again. And… now it is gone.

I have no idea why the Sparrow team chose to be acquired. Perhaps they have dreams of changing the world of email - and there is certainly no better place than the Gmail team to make that happen. Yet - Google and plenty of other big firms have done a terrible job at harnessing the talent that young entrepreneurs have. Whether it be bureaucracy, current inertia, internal politics or some other lame excuse, acquired talent streams out of big companies.

Sparrow is not alone. Google recently acquired QuickOffice too.

Perhaps there is another explanation. One that Marco Arment touches on in a blog post today. Perhaps Sparrow’s business wasn’t healthy. A-team engineers are expensive and paying them top notch salaries while selling a $1.99 app is hard, maybe impossible. Perhaps their engineers were tired of eating Ramen noodles or wanted the $250,000/year salaries they know they have the talent to earn.

This is not a good trend for Apple. Apple is depending on apps like Sparrow to make the iOS platform shine. Excellent apps like Sparrow cost a lot of money to build and maintain. Apple should be working hard to ensure independent app developers can earn even more than top salaries at Google, or they will all be poached away.

There are two things Apple can do to help developers make more money:

1) Allow developers to charge monthly/annual subscription pricing.

An app developer can only charge a one time price BEFORE the user has experienced the app. This price must be low enough not to scare away users, yet high enough to pay for the operations of the business. In the productivity app space, we are seeing more of the former, not the later. (a) I only paid $9.99 for Sparrow years ago and yet it has added a lot of value to my life. I’m definitely ready to pay more, even an annual subscription - the way I do for Evernote, Dropbox or Backblaze.

In the iTunes store, when you buy a song for $.99, the artist has already created the song and it never changes. A lot of games in the app store are like songs, or more naturally can use in-app purchases to generate revenue. Productivity apps need a different pricing model.

2) Allow developers to track the success of social and internet ad campaigns.

Today, if we decide to spend $10,000 on a LinkedIn campaign *AND* TechCrunch decides to write a blog post about my product, I have no idea which source I should attribute the increased downloads to. Once a user enters the App Store, I lose all ability to know the source where this user was originally acquired.

Independent developers have very limited ad budgets and many productivity apps are not inherently social. Ads are required to attract users. Developers need to run lots of small experiments, figure out what works and double down on those sources. Yet, we are blind. (b) Apple has concrete data - it should expose our campaign data to us, privately.

Over the years, Apple has added more vertically oriented pricing models to the iTunes/App Store world. Two examples are movie rentals and magazine subscriptions.

Apple - make productivity apps the next focus!

Nilay Patel, Co-founder and CEO

(a) I’m omitting in-app purchases in this discussion about productivity apps. There is no way an app like Sparrow or QuickOffice can implement in-app purchases without making users feel like they are being nickel and dimed.

(b) I am well aware that there are many tricks developers can do to “guess” which campaigns generate which results. These are all still guesses.

Selligy design principles for the next generation of apps

Fri, 13 Jul 2012 15:36:56 -0700

The Selligy team just returned from two days at the Mobile Beat 2012 conference where we were competing in the mobile app competition. The theme of the conferece was design, and its growing importance for not just consumer apps, but enterprise apps as well. This was a trend we saw coming over a year ago when we started Selligy, so it was nice to see the industry as a whole getting on board.

So while design is on the mind, I thought I’d take the opportunity to talk a little bit about the design-first philosophy we’ve taken while building Selligy’s app.

There are two big ideas that have driven our product development from the beginning. This is a quick overview; I’ll elaborate a bit more on these in subsequent posts.

The first principle is that what we present should be contextual to a user’s current situation. The data we have available on a mobile phone can give us a pretty good idea of what a user is doing at any given time. Since Selligy is all about meetings, that’s what we’re looking for - what’s next on your calendar? Does it look like a meeting? How far away is the user from the address we found in the invite? What are the traffic conditions in between? Who else was invited? We use all that information to present the user with a unique view of that meeting, and we predict what they need right now.

The second principle is that the app should be simple, filter out the noise, and show only what’s relevant right now. One of the major problems we see with enterprise software like Salesforce is information overload. All the fields of data associated with an account or contact in Salesforce usually won’t even fit on a desktop screen without scrolling, let alone an iPhone screen. We want to narrow that down to what you need right now for the task at hand. We don’t display email addresses and phone numbers for contacts, just simple buttons that connect you to them quickly.

The overarching idea here is that apps need to be designed around activities, not just single data points. They should be able to pull together all the data you need from multiple sources into one single cohesive experience. We believe this will be the future of applications, particularly in the mobile space. I’ll be writing about these ideas and the design decisions they’ve driven us to in upcoming posts, so stay tuned.

Brian Scates, Creative Director

Selligy Blog

Will your sales kickoff last longer than your New Year’s Resolutions?

Here’s how mobile CRM can help

Top Sales Apps: Four critical app categories

Connecting with customer data

General customer intelligence

Connect with corporate systems

Travel

It’s all about sales productivity

Get Past Tesla vs. Edison, Just Don’t Forget Kettering (or, why sometimes it's the invisible inventions that count)

You Can't Coach What You Cant See: Mobile CRM and Sales Productivity

Houston. Selligy. Roll program!

Getting to space takes fuel (and a guidance system)

The Mission:Build great mobile tools for sales.

Introducing Selligy Enterprise:Starting a pilot at a company near you

The 3 Biggest CRM Stories of the Last Week

SugarCRM’s $40 million:A new leader on the horizon?

Evolution CRM Conference 2013:Mobile, Social, Customer Experience

Bye bye, Ballmer, bye bye.

The CRM Graveyard: Mobile CRM, Sales Operations, and Saving Dead Custom Fields

Why is it hard to get great data?

Back from the dead.

But wait there’s more …

The next enterprise software category will not end in “M”

Making the customer king

How can you tell if someone has deep enterprise experience? By how they respect sales.

The stereotype … versus the guy who built your business

Enough self-righteousness, the jokes are still funny

And, more importantly: Aaron is still right!

Why the heck did Salesforce borrow $1 billion dollars?

Indispensable Mobile Sales Apps – The Road Warrior List

Three things any good salesperson (or Homer Simpson) could have told the Super Bowl ad makers

We're accelerating!

Why Selligy doesn’t have job descriptions

Six cringeworthy things at Dreamforce (that I’m glad no one made me do)

1. Dressing as a donkey.

2. Wearing fake appendages.

3. Wearing the big logo suit.

4. Going over the top, as a fake superhero.

5. Not going over the top enough, as James Bond characters.

6. Wearing a kimono.

Founder Showcase grand prize goes to Selligy

Selligy has been invited to compete at the Founder Showcase demo...

Apple : Help the best app developers not get "acquihired"!

Selligy design principles for the next generation of apps

The Mission:
Build great mobile tools for sales.

Introducing Selligy Enterprise:
Starting a pilot at a company near you

SugarCRM’s $40 million:
A new leader on the horizon?

Evolution CRM Conference 2013:
Mobile, Social, Customer Experience